Political Alterity in Pathé’s French and British Newsreel Coverage of the May 1968 Events in Paris

1_Introduction

This article compares how French and British newsreels reported the May 1968 events in Paris. The May 1968 events, which began as a series of protests at Paris Nanterre University, soon became one of the year’s defining features, as anti-capitalist demonstrations spread from the university campus to nearby factories and onto the Paris streets. In documenting these events, contemporary newsreels used various strategies of alterity to explain the protests for those watching at home. However, there are significant differences in the representational strategies adopted by French and British newsreels. This article explores the use of political alterity in footage of the May 1968 events by comparing items from the French and British newsreels. In particular, it undertakes a close comparative analysis of two items: a French item entitled “Jours de Fièvre” [Days of Fever] from Les Actualités Françaises, circa 18 May 1968,[1] and a British item from Pathé News, which appears to have been filmed almost concurrently despite having a later distribution date.[2] Both items were produced by divisions of the same company, Pathé, but there are notable differences in presentation for domestic (French) and international (British) audiences.

Whereas the French footage emphasizes the differences between the viewers at home and the protestors out on the streets, the British footage focuses on purported contrasts between British and French models of democracy. In both cases, figures of alterity are used to produce a sense of national stability. The present article compares the newsreels’ different representations of events to develop a discussion about the uses of alterity in the media. In one of the seminal essays on this topic, Jean Baudrillard — who had personal experience of the May 1968 events during his time teaching at Paris X Nanterre — characterized the social effect of the television as a source of information: “each person sees himself at the controls of a hypothetical machine, isolated in a position of perfect and remote sovereignty, at an infinite distance from his universe of origin.”[3] The 1968 newsreels are a good example of how television formats use alterity to create the sovereignty of both the viewer and the nation in which they are shown. The newsreels help their viewers to create a coherent sense of identity by defining themselves against another group (the protestors), so that the Other becomes the “remainder, [which] is left after the operation of determining” one’s own identity.[4]

Opposing this division between Self and Other, theorists of alterity have often focused on the ethical imperative of engaging with the Other, which entails “[a] putting into question within me of the natural position of the subject, of the perseverance of the I.”[5] In a similar vein, Paul Ricoeur argued that “the selfhood of oneself implies Otherness to such an intimate degree that one cannot be thought without the other, that instead one passes into the Other, as we might say in Hegelian terms.”[6] However, from the perspective of cultural criticism it is also important to consider how and why media sources use alterity to locate their viewers in a world of potentially limitless differences. As Brian Treanor observes, “[t]here are fewer and fewer places in the world, physical or intellectual, where we are not confronted in a very obvious way with issues related to what it means to be other.”[7] The 1968 newsreels provide a pertinent case study of how media sources negotiate between multiple categories and contestations, using techniques of alterity to appeal to a mass audience, for whom they fashion a reassuringly coherent identity. A recent study of bias in the media shows that this phenomenon arises not only from “supply-driven bias,” but also from “demand-driven bias,” as consumers demand “confirmatory news” on the basis of three incentives.[8] Firstly, this bias enables them to delegate the responsibility for making sense of uncertainty; secondly, consumers derive “psychological utility” from “news whose bias matches their own prior beliefs;” and thirdly, they trust the reputation of their chosen outlets.[9] The aim of this article is to explore the category of ‘psychological utility,’ by showing how figures of alterity in the newsreels help viewers dismiss alternative perspectives that might otherwise challenge their most deeply held values.

2_Defining Alterity

Naturally enough for a concept premised upon difference, alterity has acquired a plethora of meanings in recent cultural scholarship. Most notably, theorists have debated whether alterity denotes an absolute difference between Self and Other, or whether this difference is relative. Applying this debate to practical questions of identity, multiculturalism, and nationalism in the context of economic and social globalization, Brian Treanor favors a ‘chiastic’ approach, maintaining that:

No other we experience or relate to is either completely foreign or perfectly intelligible. Alterity and similitude are always encountered together as aspects of otherness, the otherness in ourselves or the otherness of the other.[10]

Treanor does not go as far as Ricoeur in deriving the ethical imperative that “one cannot be thought without the Other, that instead one passes into the Other.”[11] Rather, this approach involves the recognition that the differences between Self and Other are not absolute: viewers are never completely like those with whom they identify and never completely unlike those from whom they distinguish themselves. To this extent, Treanor’s position resembles William Wordsworth’s classic formulation, in the ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads, that “upon the accuracy with which similitude in dissimilitude, and dissimilitude in similitude are perceived, depend our taste and our moral feelings.”[12] Wordsworth highlights that this perception has a moral dimension: the exaggeration of difference leads to unnecessary conflict, and it is therefore important to recognize points of overlap, as well as points of departure between our own value systems and those of others. For example, the political situation in Britain in 1968 (characterized by events such as the demonstration against the Vietnam War in March, Enoch Powell’s ‘rivers of blood’ speech in April, and the Ford sewing machinists strike in June) bore several resemblances to that in France. The British newsreels arguably attempt to disguise these similarities by emphasizing the differences between the two countries. One possible benefit of this strategy is that it would help to allay viewers’ fears that violent protests would spread from Paris to London. However, the attendant cost is that this strategy risks exaggerating the differences which British viewers perceived between themselves and their neighbors in France. As will be discussed later, the British newsreels characterize the Paris demonstrations as a distinctly French problem, which is therefore undeserving of British involvement or understanding.

Given the relative nature of alterity, some scholars have attempted to make sense of the many differences between identities and value systems by defining common categories of Other. Shingo Shimada identifies four such categories, including: 1) “[o]rdinary members of society who are connected through market and public sphere;” 2) “[p]eople who are demarcated from civil society, like delinquents;” 3) “intra-western Others” who exist “outside the context of their own society;” and 4) “external Others who are not part of modern western civilization.”[13] Though these categories provide useful orientation by showing that individuals can be treated as other on many different grounds, there is also a danger of being reductive if critics hold too firmly to categories within realm of difference. As noted above, the characteristic of difference is that it is shifting and inconstant: “No other […] is either completely foreign or perfectly intelligible.”[14] As often happens, two individuals who find themselves aligned along one axis of difference may well discover that their values conflict along another (e.g. two animal rights protestors might have very different views about gay marriage). Alterity thus operates like a rhizome, which “is made only of lines; lines of segmentarity and stratification as its dimensions […] a map that is always detachable, connectable, reversible, modifiable, and has multiple entranceways and exits.”[15] Depending on the context, different categories and dividing lines assume a greater or lesser importance, as individuals coordinate their value systems and distinguish themselves from others. The 1968 newsreels thus align viewers who ordinarily have very different political and socio-economic positions by uniting them against the Other of the protestors. Temporarily, as a contingent response to the protests, whether one is pro- or anti-demonstration becomes the crucial category of difference. As will become clear in the analysis, additional categories continue to play a subtle role, so that the pro- and anti-protest groups soon fall into different factions.

For the purposes of this article, alterity may be defined as another way of being which poses a challenge, sometimes perceived as a threat, to the values on which one premises one’s identity. From this perspective, alterity has much in common with Nelson Goodman’s constructivist account of ‘worldmaking,’ in which individuals use processes of composition, decomposition, weighting, ordering, deletion, supplementation, and deformation to select from the information available and construct world versions which support their value systems.[16] Each of these processes can be seen at work in the analysis of the newsreels. However, in this as in other contexts, it is true to say that “the pluralism that would ask us not only to recognize the validity of other world-versions […] but also to accept that what we thought was the world is only one world among many, is hugely problematic.”[17] Accepting the Other sometimes comes at the perceived cost of reassessing one’s own value system. Were the viewers of the newsreels to sympathize too strongly with the protestors, they would be forced to countenance the possibility of joining them out on the streets. The state-sponsored newsreels thus seek, in various ways, to downplay the legitimacy of the protests, either by portraying the protestors as irrational and undemocratic (British newsreels) or by making the protests seem localized and inconsequential (French newsreels).

3_Media Reception of the May 1968 Events in France

Since information about the May 1968 events is readily available, this article will constrain itself to offering a short summary before focusing on how these events were portrayed in the media. The immediate build-up to the events began in February, when the French Communists and French Socialists formed an alliance to overthrow Charles de Gaulle.[18] On March 22, around 150 students occupied an administrative building at the University of Paris X Nanterre.[19] The students subsequently dispersed after police surrounded the building, however by May 2, the campus was shut down due to fears of an imminent attack by right-wing extremists.[20] On May 7, around 30,000 students marched on the Sorbonne to protest the police invasion and forced closure of the University, leading to hundreds of arrests.[21] By May 10, another crowd had gathered on the Rive Gauche, where efforts to contain the situation led to further arrests and injuries.[22] At this point, the police response, perceived by some as draconian, contributed to increased support for the students, especially among trade unions.[23] On May 13, the Confédération Générale du Travail [General Confederation of Workers] and the Force Ouvrière [Workers’ Force] called for one-day strikes, during which more than a million people marched through Paris.[24] The Prime Minister, Georges Pompidou, announced the release of those taken prisoner during the protests and the reopening of the Sorbonne, however the Sorbonne was reoccupied and on May 15, workers at the Renault factory in Rouen joined the student protestors.[25] By May 16, 50 factories had been occupied across Paris, with 200,000 workers on strike.[26] The following day, this figure had risen to two million on strike, and by the next week the number was, at a conservative estimate, approximately seven million.[27] The situation continued to escalate until, on May 28, François Mitterrand of the Federation of the Democratic and Socialist Left declared that “there is no more state.”[28] On May 29, Charles de Gaulle left France, precipitating the decision taken following day to schedule an election for June 23.[29]

With so many groups involved in the May 1968 events, the question of alterity is a complex one, requiring the multifaceted analysis outlined above. It has been suggested that the May events initially, at least, bridged differences between groups (e.g. the students and the workers) that were traditionally in different strata of the social structure. Kristin Ross argues that “the political subjectivity that emerged in May was a relational one, built around a polemics of equality: a day-to-day experience of identifications, aspirations, encounters and missed encounters, meetings, deceptions, and disappointments.”[30] To this extent, the effect of the May events was to diminish perceptions of alterity, as workers and students from different socio-economic and ethnic backgrounds found a common cause. However, the protests by no means enjoyed unanimous support. In a statistical analysis of contemporary public opinion, Mattei Dogan found that “[i]f a popular uprising had occurred, 20% of French [people] would have supported it, 23% would have resisted it, and 57% would have done nothing (including 17% who were undecided).”[31] With so many undecided, decisions about who would occupy which side of the “lines of segmentarity and stratification” were significantly influenced by the media portrayal of events.[32] This process was complicated by the fact that both the protestors and the government employed versions of the same narrative to expound their positions. An analysis of the contemporary newspaper headlines reveals that while

the main concrete political claims of the students as well as the workers were made in relation to democratic participation […] the claims by politicians, both oppositional and governing, were framed around democratic legitimacy and the representation of power as well.[33]

In other words, all the major stakeholders in the May events couched their positions in the language of democracy. Thus, while some have argued that “1968 contributed to a renewal of civil society” and a deeper “understanding of how associations and institutions occupy the social space between atomized individuals,” the May events also filled this social space with confusion, raising urgent questions about alterity and the alignment of interests.[34]

Many of these questions were answered by the newsreels, which, as Others have shown, “shadowed the story of May from university crisis to national crisis as the May riots and strikes gained progressively in prominence.”[35] As was noted above, both the British and French newsreels were produced by divisions of the Pathé company. The Société Pathé Frères was founded by Charles Pathé in 1896 and invented the newsreel form, with French Pathé showing its first newsreel in 1908.[36] In France, Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française (RTF) maintained a monopoly over national broadcasting in 1968, with the result that “television had to find a language and a purpose common to all.”[37] On the other side of the Channel, Pathé News, now known as British Pathé, produced newsreels in the UK from 1910–69.[38] Initially, these were short, silent films issued at cinemas twice a week, but by the 1960s they had begun to develop towards the modern television news format familiar today.[39] Early on, people began to interrogate the relationship between newsreels and news, with Walter Benjamin remarking that their “propagandist importance […] can hardly be overestimated.”[40] In recent years, scholars have predominantly focused on the political content of World War II newsreels, noting that “the making of movies was tightly regulated, requiring governmental preapproval of […] virtually every detail of production.”[41] As a result, less attention has been given to how postwar newsreels responded to the lessening of censorship controls. By 1968, the producers of newsreels had a wide array of cinematic techniques at their disposal, and used these to appeal to local audiences “by dubbing voice-over commentary, other forms of content editing and especially by incorporating locally shot material.”[42] A comparison of items from the French and British newsreels produced during the May events reveals the sophisticated strategies they use to manipulate categories of alterity.

4_Item from the French Newsreel

In the French newsreel, figures of alterity are used to divide and isolate the protestors. The item above is entitled “Days of Fever” [Jours de Fièvre], but it begins with rapturous scenes of crowds waving the French Tricolour and cheering Charles de Gaulle during his state visit to Bucharest, which took place from May 14–18.[43] Punning on the film’s title, the narrator announces that de Gaulle was received with a “fever of enthusiasm,” thus projecting an image of him as a strong democratic leader.[44] As the narrator refers to “distant rumors of a revolt,” stately music introduces images of de Gaulle addressing the packed and appreciative Romanian parliament.[45] The effect is to depict France as an important democratic power, while implying that the crowds of protestors (who remain unseen) are the antithesis of the democratic crowds in Romania. During this scene, the narrator adopts de Gaulle’s internal focalization, implicitly sympathizing with him, to remark that while he occupies the stage in Bucharest “other occupations must be haunting his mind.”[46] At this point, the newsreel abruptly cuts to an image of Paris X Nanterre accompanied by dramatic music, with the narrator announcing: “here is the Faculty of Nanterre where everything began.”[47] In a rhetorical figure of anaphora (beginning a series of clauses with the same word), the narrator repeatedly names Nanterre as the center of the protests. This has the effect of localizing the protests and making the protestors seem like small group of disaffected individuals.

While the narrator describes the faculty as a “ferment of virulent revolt,” the footage shows groups of students calmly talking or passively staging sit-ins.[48] The newsreel uses humor to delegitimize the protests, as the narrator remarks that the lecture halls are “crowded like they never were before.”[49] More seriously, he observes that the professors have been replaced by “orators” and uses the French noun “aréopage” to refer to the student body.[50] Although this noun is sometimes used in French to refer to an ‘assembly,’ the newsreel also plays on the association of the Areopagus in Greece with the origins of democracy. On the one hand, the voiceover recognizes that the students are playing their part in a democratic process, but on the other it suggests that they are too immature to adopt the function of the learned Greek council. Throughout these scenes, the viewers of the newsreel are encouraged to regard the students with suspicion, as the narrator singles out Daniel Cohn-Bendit as “one of the principal chiefs of the rebellion.”[51] The camera zooms in on Cohn-Bendit as he heckles from the audience of the lecture theater, repeatedly pointing his figure at the speaker, who is introduced as a “Nobel prize winner,” Jacques Monod.[52] By referring to Monod using his title (literally, as “a Nobel prize”), the voiceover implies that Cohn-Bendit displays an inappropriate disregard for authority. Cohn-Bendit’s words are drowned out by the voiceover, preventing the viewer from engaging with his argument, as the protests are portrayed as the actions of a small group of rebellious instigators.

Whereas scholars have subsequently argued that “the political subjectivity that emerged in May was a relational one,” uniting the students and the workers, the French newsreel emphasizes the differences between these two groups.[53] As the footage cuts from the lecture hall to an image of the Renault factory in Rouen, the music becomes more intense and the voiceover announces that the situation deteriorated when the “ordinary workers” at Renault decided to “imitate the students.”[54] In this way, the striking workers, who are depicted standing around waiting for instruction, are portrayed as a leaderless and potentially dangerous mob who might imitate the students without understanding their motives. The newsreel suggests that while it might be permissible for the students to engage in hypothetical political discussions, it is unacceptable for the workers to follow their example. Depicted waiting behind a wrought iron fence, the workers are presented as an external threat poised to rush in and overturn social norms.[55] In this way, the Paris protestors are divided from one another, with a few enthusiastic students implicitly being blamed for stirring up a dangerous revolt among the workforce. Throughout, the viewers at home are addressed as a democratic collective, like the crowds in Bucharest, whose social reality is at risk of being overturned by the extreme actions of a small group of protestors. A recent study highlights the fact that “the delimited demos is always essentially vulnerable to real or perceived attacks from within and without, against its boundaries.”[56] In other words, democratic society is constructed in such a way that its members fear the actions of Others who might undermine the stability they enjoy. The French footage uses figures of alterity to portray the protestors as such as threat, while stressing that those involved in the protests are not a coherent group, but a leaderless array of confused individuals.

5_Item from the British Newsreel

Though probably filmed the same week, the item from the British newsreel marks a stark contrast to its French counterpart. From the beginning, the emphasis is on conflict, as the newsreel depicts France as a society divided against itself. Over footage of a crowd marching down the streets, the narrator refers to “students and other left-wing demonstrators” and expresses bafflement at “their cause, whatever it is.”[57] Rather than presenting the demonstrators being divided against themselves, as in the French footage, the British newsreel seeks to distinguish the protestors en masse from the democratic British viewers watching at home. With a dramatic soundtrack, the film quickly cuts to scenes of violent clashes between the police and the protestors, with the camera positioned behind the armed police and implicitly placing the viewers on their side.[58] There is a long sequence of close-up shots of projectiles and explosions, during which the sounds of gunshots and sirens have either been exaggerated or dubbed on in the mix.[59] The effect is to immerse the viewers in the chaos of the French riots while they spectate from the comfort of their British homes. Nonetheless, the positioning of the camera behind barriers such as trees and fences continues to emphasize the separation between the viewers and the protestors. Later, a deliberately striking image of a young woman being forcefully escorted away by two male police officers raises questions about the use of police force and invites the viewer to speculate whether either side is truly in the right.[60] The British viewers are thus placed in a privileged position as observers and commentators on the French events, without being given the detailed political information that would enable them to understand and evaluate the conflict.

At this point, the item switches to a Peugeot factory in eastern France, without distinguishing between the two sets of protests, and itemizes the facts that “a man was shot dead and many injured.”[61] The narrator refers to the protestors as an “incensed mob […] on the warpath,” once again refraining from the attempt to understand or present their causes.[62] Rather than examining the political context, the newsreel focuses on the type of weaponry employed, presenting the protests as a dramatic spectacle for the enjoyment of the British audiences.[63] In one of the few overtly political statements, the narrator endorses the fact that “President de Gaulle acted quickly” and “outlawed seven anarchist and dissident communist organizations.”[64] Nonetheless, the voiceover continues to be punctuated by night footage of fires in the streets and the sound of explosions, building up the climactic statement that “war raged in the streets of Paris” as a Molotov cocktail is filmed descending from the sky.[65] The final scene depicts a bulldozer “cleaning up the battlefields,” implying that the French government has lost control and that the country is in a state of crisis.[66]

A study of contemporary newspaper articles about the May 1968 events concludes that “[a] strong European public sphere is completely absent from the debates, either on the level of actors or on the level of values or ideas.”[67] This position is borne out by the British newsreel, which repeatedly emphasizes that the protests are a distinctly French problem remote from the British viewers. This, of course, overlooks the fact that Britain experienced similar tensions during the anti-war demonstrations in London, the Ford sewing machinists strike, and Enoch Powell’s ‘rivers of blood’ speech, which “fuelled a mass outpouring of popular support […] and elevated Powell in many eyes from the status of champion to martyr.”[68] Arguably, the British footage emphasizes the violence in Paris to unify the British audience against the protestors in France and draw attention away from the similar divisions in British society. The item thus provides a “psychological utility” for its viewers, by presenting the protestors as irrational Others and helping them to dismiss any similarities between their points of view.[69]

The rhizomatic nature of alterity comes to the fore, as the newsreel’s producers redraw the various “lines of segmentarity and stratification” to create bonds between the British viewers, while distancing them as a group from the French protestors.[70] This is done in various ways, for example through the physical positioning of the camera behind the barriers,[71] the critical tone of the voiceover which describes the protestors as an “incensed mob,”[72] the emphasis of background sounds like gunshots and sirens to increase the sense of threat,[73] and the choice of which footage to include and which to leave out. Throughout the item, the British audience is constructed in a way that recalls Benedict Anderson’s description of ‘imagined communities:’ “regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship.”[74] As in Anderson’s description, the British newsreel skims over the actual economic, ethnic, and gender inequalities that motivated and fuelled the protests. These might have formed the basis for a comparison between French and British society in 1968. However, such a comparison was politically sensitive and risked igniting further tensions in the UK, which might explain why the British newsreel instead maps alterity along national lines, implying that France’s democracy is less robust and efficient than that in the UK.

6_Concluding Remarks

Both the British and French newsreels construct the viewers’ country as a center of civilized democracy, using various figures of alterity to account for the riots and distance those at home from the scenes of violence on the streets of Paris. In the item from the French newsreel, de Gaulle is celebrated as a democratic leader and the naive students in the Latin Quarter are castigated for inflaming violent sentiments among the impressionable “ordinary workers.”[75] In the item from the British newsreel, the French government is depicted as being out of control and at the mercy of a warlike mob with unreasonable demands. Though they frame alterity along very different lines, both newsreels use this concept to portray their viewers as members of a democratic majority that is “vulnerable to real or perceived attacks from within and without.”[76] The analysis of the newsreels shows that alterity is a highly mutable concept, which can be used to polarize audiences along very different lines depending on the context and the aims of the producer. Though it remains true to say that “no other […] is either completely foreign or perfectly intelligible,” the newsreels show that the pluralism that would allow multiple interpretations and world versions to co-exist alongside one another is not the end of the story.[77]

Both the British and French newsreels imply that if the viewers give too much credence to the aims of the protestors, then this will have an immediate and dramatic impact on their own lives at home. They imply that values of civilized democracy cannot co-exist with the demands of the protestors: The two world versions are mutually exclusive and a choice must be made between them. The debate thus becomes polarized, as the newsreels exaggerate the alterity between the various stakeholders until the differences between them change from being relative to absolute ones. In both cases, the identities of the viewers watching at home are constructed against the identities of the protestors. However, the French audience is distinguished from the demonstrators along economic and ethnic lines (with the blame being placed predominantly on the ordinary workers in the Latin Quarter), while the British audience is demarcated along national lines. Whereas the item from the French newsreel consistently emphasizes the lines of alterity separating the students from the ordinary workers, the item from the British newsreel repeatedly conflates these two groups to simplify the political conflicts that underpinned the May 1968 events and portray the protests as a specifically French phenomenon.

Without surveying a wider range of footage, it is not possible to make general claims about systemic bias within the French or British newsreels. However, the object of this paper was not to uncover any specific biases, but rather to use an in-depth comparison of two newsreel items to show how strategies of alterity influence the portrayal of seminal political stories such as the May 1968 events in Paris. Although both newsreels were produced and distributed by divisions of the same company, and although both might still be said to display the objectivity and professionalism of news broadcast, there are significant differences between them. A close comparison of the two items reveals the extent to which the lines of alterity can be redrawn and the ‘facts’ of a news item re-narrated to provide viewers with “psychological utility.”[78] This utility can vary from the reassurance that the French government was able to control the riots to the confirmation that the inequalities in British society would not lead to similar protests on the streets of London.

In turn, analyzing the newsreels with critical and historical distance can help us to understand how such strategies of alterity continue to operate in digitized media today. As the market responds to the “demand-driven bias” for “confirmatory news,” it becomes increasingly important to observe and explain the ways in which news media draw and redraw the dividing lines of alterity within the communities that consume their products.[79] In this way, it becomes clearer how national and private news outlets help to construct the events they narrate by influencing the public’s response to them.

[17] Matthew Taunton, “Worlds Made of Concrete and Celluloid: The London Council Estate in Nil By Mouth and Wonderland,” in Cultural Ways of Worldmaking: Media and Narratives, eds. Vera Nünning, Ansgar Nünning, and Birgit Neumann, (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2010), 175–188, here: 175.

_Essays

About On_Culture

On_Culture is an Open Access refereed journal focusing on conceptual and methodological approaches to the study of culture. It publishes original scholarly _Articles and _Essays biannually as well as _Perspectives in a wide range of genres and media formats and on a rolling basis. The journal strives to create a dynamic online knowledge base among scholars and the general public.